magic realism

Yesterday the Washington Post ran an article about a fascinating language-related development in, of all places, a police department.

In Nezahualcoyotl, a municipality on the outskirts of Mexico City, police supervisors have begun to translate great works of Spanish-language literature from Spanish ... into Cop Spanish. The idea originally came about when supervisors were bemoaning the lack of interest in the tutoring program they had established to help educate its officers, many of whom never even finished high school. At first, the program was the educational equivalent of pulling teeth. But then they got clever.

They decided to start incorporating local police code into the program. A regional chief translated Don Quixote, and, all of a sudden, there was a surge of interest in reading. Police officers began to ask for books. And by the time this article was researched, they were happily discussing One Hundred Years of Solitude - and participating in classes where phrases like "Destroy the narrative line!" were bandied about.

Read the full article here (registration may be required) - it's well worth it.

What particularly interests me about this story isn't, as you might think, the structure of Mexican Police Code, but rather the pedagogical strategy at work. Which is to say this: "Don't dumb it down; just make it accessible."

I mean, Don Quixote and One Hundred Years of Solitude aren't exactly pieces of proverbial cake. Hell, I don't think I could tell you what the hell even happened in One Hundred Years of Solitude - I remember a woman eating mud? Is that right?

The point is that these are gutsy choices. And the genius of it is that it sets a really important tone right from the start: "We think you're smart." So often I come across non-fiction that pretends to want to impart information but treats the reader as inferior right from the get-go. The tone in these cases is "I think I'm smarter than you, and I shall deign to acquaint you with my vast intelligence."

I'm thinking, of course, of language books. Specifically, books about advanced English usage. Even more specifically, a certain book that features pandas and punctuation.

While I thoroughly enjoyed Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, I was deeply unsettled by the tone. Although I'm sure it was exaggerated for comic effect, Truss's disdain for those unacquainted with proper punctuation really put me off. Because it seemed to me that she wasn't writing a book to instruct the uninitiated with regard to apostrophes, but rather that she was writing a book to instruct the initiated with regard to mocking the uninitiated.

And then, she complains that some people don't know any better - and, horror! - that these people don't know any better despite the presence of her book, which would obviously set them straight.

Well: duh. Who wants to read a book that belittles them? And let me say this: just because someone hasn't acquired a knack for commas doesn't mean that they're impossibly stupid. Jesus, people. I cringe at a punctuation error like many others, but that's because I work as a copyeditor. It is, from time to time, my job to cringe at punctuation errors. And if I see a sign that's been professionally error-ridden, I get mad, because one of my colleagues is out there doing a shitty job. But do I assume that just because someone slips an its/it's error into an email that they're somehow subhuman? No.

I have limited classroom experience, having formally taught in only two situations: last year I volunteered as a tutor, and during my brief stint in grad school, I was the TA in a course on Middle Eastern government and politics.

(Which was particularly absurd because I knew absolutely nothing about Middle Eastern government and politics - my focus was East Asia. But apparently for my departmental coordinator, one non-European culture was as good as the next. Plus ça change....)

So I can't say that I really understand first-hand the practicalities of teaching. But I am an overeducated swot who comes from a family of teachers, which means that I actually spend a great deal of time thinking about the mechanics of education. And this is what I believe: oftentimes there's an initial hurdle to learning, kind of a barrier to entry, if you will. Study, frankly, can be scary. However, the solution to that doesn't have to be bar-lowering. Instead, try enjoyment-raising - the metaphorical equivalent of setting up a trampoline. Make your teaching witty, make your teaching entertaining, but above all, make your teaching respectful. Because if you don't respect your students from the get-go, I guarantee that unless your students are the type who crave positive pedagogical feedback (in which case they probably don't need any encouragement to study, as this is a key trait of the classic teacher's pet), they will shut down and stop listening.

In fact, unless you're actually in a school, don't even think of your students as students at all - because they don't have to be there. And you don't have any authority over them, no matter how much of a megalomaniac you might be. Instead, think of them as customers - and you have to fight for them.

There's a difference between willfully stupid and willed-to-be stupid. I have nothing but contempt for one and compassion for the other. I leave it to you to figure out which is which.

wheeze-it

Here's an interesting blog post from Jennifer 8. Lee at the NYT City Room blog. (Aside: I had no idea that the Times had so many blogs. I notice that Judith Warner's blog is only updated once a week. Does that even count as a blog? Isn't that just a web-only column? I'm going to stop asking questions now before I start seriously contemplating the semantics of blogging and slip into a meta-coma.)

The post/web-only article hints at the difficulties of practicing medicine and treating patients in a city whose residents speak dozens of different languages - in this particular case, the problems faced by doctors trying to diagnose asthma in Spanish-speaking patients. She writes: "In interviews with 39 Spanish speakers, 'wheeze' was translated into 12 different Spanish expressions, including 'tight chest,' 'suffocation,' 'asphyxiation,' 'snoring' and 'congested breathing.'" And, as "wheeze" is obviously a rather key term for respiratory diagnosis, a Columbia University Medical Center survey has targeted translation as a major issue in treating the rise in respiratory ailments among the city's Latino population.

Now, it's obvious that it is not the case, as I suspect Ms. Lee well knows, that there is no word in Spanish for "wheeze." But most reporters seem to find the "no word in [pick a language] for [pick a concept that somehow demonstrates the strangeness of said language or culture]" template irresistible - probably because hyperbole makes for a sweet lede. But clearly, Spanish-speakers have been wheezing just as long as English-speakers, and somewhere along the line they've undoubtedly come up with a word or phrase to describe the phenomenon. And the discussion in the comments section certainly bears this out. (As you might expect, the nasty implication that any misdiagnoses are the patients' faults for failing to learn English also rears its ugly little head. Which is so lacking in compassion and basic human decency that I won't even dignify it with a response.)

The problem, as far as I can see, seems not to be that there isn't one word in Spanish for "wheeze," but rather that there are lots of them, and that many medical professionals are not, as it turns out, equipped to deal with the lexical variation - which is no mere fodder for linguistic cocktail-party convo, but rather a serious and pressing public-health issue. And this is why I'm more than happy to forgive Ms. Lee any language-related lily-gilding. Because she certainly manages to make that latter point clear.

By the way, Language Log has a number of posts relating to the "No word for X" syndrome (or snowclone, as regular readers of that site know) that are well worth reading. My favorite is Geoffrey Pullum's "No word for 'lazy hack parroting drivel'?," but you can find a list of a number of others here.

everybody clap your hands

I live about fifteen minutes by subway from Shea Stadium, so even though I’m a lifelong Cardinals fan, I go there from time to time to get my in-person baseball fix. Now, Shea Stadium has few aesthetic charms. It’s ugly, it’s falling down, and it reeks of urine and twenty-one years of despair. Even so, it’s become one of my favorite places to watch a game. Because nowhere else can you find The Jose Reyes Spanish Academy, a series of stadium videos in which Mets shortstop Jose Reyes teaches fans basic – and often bizarre - Spanish phrases.

Like this one:



Strangely, Reyes has never related any actual baseball phrases while I’ve been in attendance. Which got me to thinking about foreign-language sports terminology. So, in honor of the postseason, I went and did a little Internetting in search of a few resources for baseball-loving linguaphiles who might want to follow the playoffs on ESPN Deportes.

The first thing to note is that there are two Spanish words for baseball itself: la pelota and el béisbol. Anyone who’s ever studied Spanish knows that there are massive lexical variations from one region to another – something that’s particularly problematic if you, like me, have a penchant for profanity. I haven’t quite been able to pin down the locations where pelota is used instead of béisbol – my initial instinct was that one would be used in Europe and the other in Latin America, but that doesn’t seem to be true.

In fact, both seem to be in use in Puerto Rico. This site notes that “in Ponce, broadcasters never refer to the baseball; the thing the pitcher throws is la Wilson (because she is la pelota - but in Caguas, they call it el Wilson because he is el béisbol).”

Another tidbit from the same page is this: “An interesting point is the use of the adaptable suffix -azo (‘wicked big’), which is too slangy to be taught in high-school Spanish.”

I can’t help but wonder: are there Red Sox fans in Puerto Rico?

In any case, if anyone knows the rhyme and reason behind la pelota and el béisbol, I would love to hear it.

The best resource for baseball Spanish is the great bilingual baseball dictionary available for download at Baseball-Reference.com. The dictionary includes a full list of all the baseball terminology you would ever have to know in the course of a regular game. It also includes useful phrases like dedos de mantequilla – literally, “fingers of butter.” This phrase has also, apparently, been turned into verb – enmantequillarse - meaning “to bobble.” Or, as I like to think of it, “to be-butter oneself.”

Another evocative definition can be found in the entry for “fluke”: gloria de mañana, or “morning glory.” In other words, something that blooms brightly in the morning and dies in the afternoon. And the translation for the Texas Rangers is Rancheros or Vigilantes – something that made me smirk pretty nastily until I remembered that in Spanish, vigilantes just means “watchmen.” I choose, however, to think that there’s a double meaning there.

My favorite entry by far, however, is this one:

biased umpire: n.f. estatua de la libertad

I don’t feel that any additional explanation is needed there. Unless, of course, it were to come courtesy of Professor Reyes.

It’s not like he has anything better to do at the moment, after all.

Later: Japanese baseball terms and how they shed light on the sudden star power of Kaz Matsui. Because I sure as hell can’t find anything else that explains it.